More Hacking Attacks Found, Officials Warn of Risk to U.S. Government - The New York Times - 0 views
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Thursday that hackers who American intelligence agencies believed were working for the Kremlin used a far wider variety of tools than previously known to penetrate government systems, and said that the cyberoffensive was “a grave risk to the federal government.”
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complicates the challenge for federal investigators as they try to assess the damage and understand what had been stolen.
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Echoing the government’s warning, Microsoft said Thursday that it had identified 40 companies, government agencies and think tanks that the suspected Russian hackers, at a minimum, stole data from. Nearly half are private technology firms, Microsoft said, many of them cybersecurity firms, like FireEye, that are charged with securing vast sections of the public and private sector.
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but intelligence agencies have told Congress that they believe it was carried out by the S.V.R., an elite Russian intelligence agency. A Microsoft “heat map” of infections shows that the vast majority — 80 percent — are in the United States, while Russia shows no infections at all.
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Investigators and other officials say they believe the goal of the Russian attack was traditional espionage, the sort the National Security Agency and other agencies regularly conduct on foreign networks.
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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has deflected the hacking as one of the many daily attacks on the federal government, suggesting China was the biggest offender — the government’s new alert left no doubt the assessment had changed.
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“Governments have long spied on each other but there is a growing and critical recognition that there needs to be a clear set of rules that put certain techniques off limits,” Mr. Smith said. “One of the things that needs to be off limits is a broad supply chain attack that creates a vulnerability for the world that other forms of traditional espionage do not.”
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“We have forgotten the lessons of 9/11,” Mr. Smith said. “It has not been a great week for information sharing and it turns companies like Microsoft into a sheep dog trying to get these federal agencies come together into a single place and share what they know.”